This article analyses ideas of ‘good governance through technology’ in India that first emerged from the software industry, symbolizing state support for the ‘new middle-class’ values of liberalized private enterprise. We suggest that the contemporary prominence of consulting firms in government represents a second transformation that embeds private sector logics within statehood. Perceived needs for technical expertise allow consultants to supply urban governance capacity as a commercial service, encouraging further outsourcing and corporatization. This phenomenon, we argue, expresses ‘anti-political’ tendencies. Consultant writings frame urban governance as primarily technical, promoting context-free policy and private-sector involvement. Acknowledged issues with technology and participation undermine assertions of digital technology’s benefits to citizens. We argue that implicit redefinitions of ‘ordinary citizens’ as middle-class dissipate these tensions between visions of government as a platform for outsourced, monetized services and India’s democratic ideals. We illustrate some effects—and limits—of these processes through an ethnographic study of a government department which supplies digital mapping and software ‘as-a-service’ to other government agencies, displacing private actors. Despite this organization’s technical expertise, local knowledge and use of digital data ‘as a platform’ for influence, political economies of land administration limit the ability of digitalization to check powerful individual and corporate actors.